You may have heard some ruckus lately over how California’s electoral votes are to be counted this election. A man named Dave Gilliard is pushing a petition to divide California’s electoral votes by district, with two votes going to the winner of California’s popular vote.
If you’re a Democrat, this means losing approximately 20 electoral votes to a political party that has supported one of the most unpopular presidents in American history.
If you’re a Republican, you probably feel as though you’ve been ignored in California because your voice is not reflected when all 55 votes go toward the opposing candidate, even if the split among voters was 54-44 as in the 2004 election.
But objectively, this proposal will do exactly the opposite of what its supporters claim. It will make California almost insignificant in presidential elections. If the proposal goes through, there will be approximately five “swing-districts” in California, reducing our state’s electoral influence to that of New Mexico. In a close election, the winner-take-all allocation in California means that a small shift in the voting could win a candidate 55 votes.
Under the proposed system, the best a candidate could hope to swing would be five votes, assuming he managed to individually win each district.
However, if there was a close election in Ohio or Florida, a candidate stands to win 20 or 27 electoral votes by a two percent change in the state’s popular vote. If a candidate has to choose to spend resources to win either California’s five contested votes or 20 or 27 votes in another state, it’s clear that California will be ignored in favor of the other state.
Furthermore, by dividing the votes by district, Gilliard also opens up the presidential election to the corrupt political practice of “gerrymandering.” Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing up districts to disenfranchise one group of voters for the benefit of another set of voters.
Traditionally, this has been done either to potentially disenfranchise racial minorities, as in Illinois’s 4th District, or to combine two geographically distant but politically similar neighborhoods, as in New York’s 28th District. This practice already corrupts the elections of the House of Representatives, and the proposal would now lay the effects of those practices on presidential elections as well.
Finally, this proposal is only fair politically if it is implemented across all states, including Republican strongholds such as Texas. There is a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact being led by Maryland, which states that if enough states agree to allocate their electoral votes proportionally to how their population votes, then all states in the compact will do so as well .
However, the Republican Party has resisted any and all attempts at instituting a national popular vote across all states because it winds up with less support overall.
Instead, the Republican Party has resorted to the traditional playground tactic of selectively altering the rules of the game just so they can still be the winner. And Americans are rightfully upset.
In short, endorsing this measure and putting it on the ballot will not only help destroy California’s strength in Washington, D.C., and in presidential elections, but it will also endorse political strategies that manipulate the laws of our state and country explicitly to benefit one political party.
Richardson is a fourth-year political science and Russian area studies student.